You may be aware of the phenomenon known as Twitter. It’s a relatively new development in the social web that enables people to stay in touch, ask or answer questions, blog, muse, or just keep up on what random people are up to…in increments of 140 characters or less. You can do this through your browser, but the 140-character limit was set with texting (SMS) in mind i.e. the most you can text. What started as a simple way to follow your friends has morphed into a new form of blogging: microblogging. You can paste links and even include photos with the TwitPic application. So it’s become a means for covering events and relaying small tidbits of news or info to large groups of people. In many cases, news is being broken on Twitter before it hits the blogs and long before it makes it to mainstream news. That hasn’t stopped CNN from having its own Twitter feed. Twitter was also used during the SoCal fires to distribute safety and emergency info.
One of the ways it can be used to live green is to subscribe to specific Twitter feeds, from everyday people and bloggers alike, and have them subscribe to you. It’s like adding a friend in MySpace. When you have a question about, say, a green product or healthy local restaurant, instead of doing a Google search and getting algorithmic results, you can Twitter the query (send a Tweet) from either your computer or your phone and get a human response. In many cases, you’ll get multiple responses and can take a consensus opinion.
First, you search your address books to see who you already know and, among them, who you want to follow. In order to find other people, you can do a simple search. Enter people’s names, cities or certain keywords that might be in their bios. From there, just start to “Follow” those who look interesting. You can delete them if their Tweets are unworthy or offensive. And when you find someone you like and respect, you can Follow all of the people they follow and start to refine your following as well as your followers.
You can sign up to follow and Twitter with Max Gladwell here.
As the title implies, this is the first Twitter post. I’m sure it will not be the last.
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1 Lifestreaming: Green Living in Real Time | Max Gladwell // Apr 24, 2008 at 6:50 pm
[...] the heart of it is Twitter, which we’ve posted about but promised more. It’s a simple communications medium that has changed how thousands [...]
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